Wifi-radar and WPA

Under my Debian installation I'm using Wifi-radar, a nice utility for managing wireless networks (although it is a GNOME application, I'm using it under KDE without problems). I've always used for WEP networks, but now I needed to start using also for WPA networks, and in order to deal with such networks, wifi-radar relies on wpa-supplicant, which is also available for Debian.

Thus, you need to setup the configuration file of wpa-supplicant so that wifi-radar can use it (thus, you cannot set WPA parameters from within wifi-radar), but this is not hard to do; for instance, in wpa_supplicant.conf you can put such a stanza:

network={
    ssid="network ssid"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    proto=WPA
    psk="network password"
}

and then you can specify the driver for your card in the "WPA" section of the wifi-radar's configuration dialog (for instance, for my ipw2200 wireless card, I chose wext).

Unfortunately, if you try this way, you'll get an error from wifi-radar due to an undefined variable:

NameError: global name 'WPA_SUPPLICANT_ARGS' is not defined

to solve this problem, I actually modified the wifi-radar script (it's a python script) by changing the line:

wpa_args = WPA_SUPPLICANT_ARGS % ( INTERFACE, profile['wpa_driver'] )

with

wpa_args = "-B -i " + INTERFACE + " -c " + WPA_SUPPLICANT_CONF + " -D " + profile['wpa_driver'] + " -P " + WPA_SUPPLICANT_PIDFILE

and now it seems to work correctly.